Feb 12 - 17Posts Are Due By Midnight On Saturday Feb. 17th ​​

This article talks about a Singaporian scientists research on cell division and its applicability to cancer treatments and cellular regeneration. During cellular division, the cell forms a "contractile ring" on the interior of the cell membrane and pinches to create the daughter cells. By being able to understand and control this structure we are closer to being able to control cell division which can help us develop cancer treatments and generate artificial cells or force cells to regenerate.

I found this mitosis comic online and thought that it was pretty amusing. In the comic the cell is about to go through mitosis, so the author of the comic decided to portray the cell as a couple, named Bill and Shirley, who are going through a divorce. The organelles within the cell are their children, while the actual cell is their house. Shortly after Shirley finally separates from Bill (cytokinesis), the cells start to go through mitosis once again after resting for some time (interphase), and so the mitosis, or "divorce", cycle begins again.

Just to put this out there, I'm not a Big Bang Theory fan but I had discovered that they used a picture of a plant cell going through the cell cycle. The intro was during the seasons 6,7, and 8 of the show. Anyways, it was definitely Mitosis and the image shown was specifically the cell in the Anaphase stage. The intro doesn't explain much but since the whole show revolves around science, it was a cool glimpse of mitosis in the intro. You can look up the intro yourself and find it at 0:08 mark.

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Poonam Saha

2/16/2018 02:41:05 pm

In class we talked about how nerve cells can't divide and it fascinated me as to why. After doing a bit of research I found that it is because they do not have centrioles, which of course is crucial for mitosis to occur. But I also found that it would do more harm than good to reproduce nerve cells. This is because each nerve cell has a specific area or place and it's job is to take a signal from one place to another. Adding another nerve cell would mess up these specific connections. This process reminds me of FaceTiming. When you face time one friend, the connection is good and everything is seen and heard clearly. But if you trying FaceTiming 2 or 3 friends at a time, the connection and signals are poor and it disrupts the entire system. Just like if you add more nerve cells, the signals they are trying to send will be compromised.

Reference: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=1710

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Siovan G

2/16/2018 06:18:26 pm

I chose this article for my blog post this week because I think that it's interesting to see sudents mix one of their passions with science, something that we will be doing for our SCICAN! projects. The article describes how college student Julien Turner wrote a rap about cell reproduction for an extra credit assignment and how it became so popular that rapper Common acknowledged it on Twitter. It's very inspiring for students to see other students' projects get recognized by celebrities. (https://nerdist.com/student-cell-reproduction-rap-video-extra-credit/)

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Mohammed E

2/16/2018 08:44:25 pm

All cells undergo cell division. They repair, grow, produce organelles and proteins, and then produce identical daughter cells. This cell “cycle” is broken up into 2 major groups: interphase and mitosis/cytokinesis. However, at a first glance to the untrained eye, interphase may seem like a “resting phase” where nothing really happens. But this is false, because things like DNA replication and even double checking occurs during this section. Without the DNA, the daughter cell won’t have the set of instructions to adapt into a specific cell or communicate with other cells. And if it doesn’t double check, cells that shouldn’t proceed to the next phase could do so anyway. This could cause cells to be produced that aren’t running optimally or even reproduce when they have damaged DNA. So overall, cell division itself is important, but the cell cycle would fall apart without interphase.

I ended up thinking about this weeks topic of cell division and mitosis while watching the movie Black Panther today when there was this scene where someone got shot in their spine, but the people in the movie were able to heal him in no time with advanced technology. I immediately started thinking about how this technology worked to speed up the healing process. I figured, the technology must have aided in the process of cell division and mitosis to make it go by faster so the body can heal and repair quicker than the average medical equipment would allow. Whether or not the wound scarred or not I'm unsure (I assume not as other wounded people did not appear to have scars later on) , but if they did manage to heal the wound without scaring would mean that they found a way to make it so that the skin cells regenerate rather than scar, which would be really cool.

Both of the pictures illustrate the concept we've been discussing over the past few days: cell division. The first picture mentions mitosis,(requiring chromatin to become condensed-per the joke) which is asexual reproduction of the cell. It is used mainly for repair and growth. As for actual reproduction(baby children, cells go through the process of meiosis mentioned in the article which required double the cell division, but half the chromosomes

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Georgia Berg

2/17/2018 11:10:50 am

This is a limerick by Ed Himelblau, a Biology Professor at California Polytechnic State University. It describes prophase, a stange in cell division where chromatins condense and centrioles move to opposite sides (poles) of the cell.

Reference: By Ed Himelblau, from http://www.himelblog.com/2015/04/mitosis-limericks-prophase.html?spref=pi&m=1

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Anamta M.

2/17/2018 11:22:41 am

A novella I read, Mitosis, had a supervillain who used the concept of mitosis to divide himself into hundreds of different copies of himself, each weaker and more unstable than the last. Although this villain called himself "Mitosis", this is clearly not what mitosis is. The cycle doesn't weaken the next cells created; the daughter cells are exact replicas of the mother cell. The only part of cell division the villain got right was how he couldn't divide instantaneously; he had to concentrate and prepare himself before he could create multiple copies of himself.

Mitosis is an important process that does so much for organisms. It’s very important in different ways to so many different types of cells. Unicellular organisms depend on mitosis for asexual reproduction. Multicellular organisms depend on mitosis for growth and repair. In stem cells, mitosis is used to divide the cells and become whatever cell is needed at the time. Stem cells in humans exist in embryos, umbilical cord blood and sometimes even in bone marrow. Scientists and researchers are trying to figure out if stem cells can use mitosis to regrow damaged tissue or possibly even regenerate organs.
This website has some more information on stem cells and how they work.
http://www.biology-pages.info/S/Stem_Cells.html

This article talks about how a university profession can use math to model cells to predict what the cell might do under drugs and treatments. This means they can try new things safely without possibly endangering a real person. They can model the cell cycle (which is shown in the comics above) as well as the environment the cell is in. This allows scientists to better understand how cancerous cells behave as well.

This is an article that talks about the three primary purposes of mitosis. Mitosis is essential for any eukaryotic cell because it is the way cells reproduce asexually. Also, growth and repair are something any organism must do if it wants to survive. If there are problems with mitosis, you can develop cancer or if it happens in a fetus, the baby may have chromosomal disorders.

The article describes a newly discovered molecular mechanism in plant cells that ceases the cell cycle if the DNA is damaged, due to the risk of producing daughter cells with damaged DNA. This relates to this week's topic as it deals with cell division and mitosis, and gives insight on complications that may occur during mitosis, and why is some cases it may be unsuccessful.

This article talks about three reasons why cell division(mitosis) is important. It also talks about what happens when cell division is messed up, and the process of mitosis. The three reasons are cell reproduction, cell growth and cell repair. Cell reproduction mostly happens in cells that produce asexually like bacteria, the cell grows to increase size until "adult-hood" size, the cell repair it self, for example, when we get cut, the cell undergoes mitosis so the scab cells can replace your pre-existing skin cells. When mitosis is uncontrolled, it creates cancer cells, these cancer cells can spread throughout the whole organism and possibly killing the organism. Mitosis is only a short portion of the cell cycle, the article then talks about the different phases of the cell cycle, starting at interphase and ending at telophase, the article chose to not include cytokinesis probably because the author of the article decided to mix cytokinesis and telophase together since they happen too fast to distinguish.

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Jayanti, U.

2/17/2018 04:37:48 pm

As you age from being an 8 pound baby to an 80 pound child, it is not your cells that get heavier in size; it is your body making cells over and over again in a process called mitosis. If you get a cut anywhere on your body, then through the process of mitosis, your cut will heal. The division of cells is very important and over your lifetime, will have occurred about 10 quadrillion times.

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Jayanti, U.

2/17/2018 04:39:03 pm

Reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0k-enzoeOM

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Joshua M.

2/17/2018 05:01:59 pm

This article discusses a study held by structural biologists at Brown University, an Ivy league school, pertaining to a key step of mitosis and how it could be used to attack cancer. In the anaphase stage of mitosis, Ki-67 brings PP1 to the chromosomes but, Ki-67 is also involved in many parts of mitosis and “used as a prognostic marker in cancer biology”. Mitosis occurs in cancer too and Ki-67 binds to PP1 very tightly and another protein - RepoMan – acts just like Ki-67. The scientists noticed a novel binding region which is unique to only RepoMan and Ki-67 and concluded that it could be used as a target for cancer therapy.

https://www.asianscientist.com/2018/02/in-the-lab/mario-magnesium-detector/
Japanese scientists have created a machine called the MARIA (Magnesium Ratiometric Indicator for Optical Imaging) which measures the levels of Mg2+ in cells. Mg2+ ions are usually captured by ATP, except during cell division. The researchers found that during cell division, the amount of Mg2+ ions increase, which allows DNA to condense during interphase. These scientists think that, because abnormalities in cell division can lead to cancer or other diseases, this discovery can help us better understand and treat these diseases.

The article above describes the harmful effects of heavy water, or D2O. The article describes the difference between regular water, H2O and heavy water, D2O as having two hydrogen atoms in its first isotope, (protium isotope; contains one proton within nucleus), against having two hydrogen atoms in its second isotope, (deuterium isotope; contains proton and neutron within nucleus). Drinking large amounts of heavy water could affect mitosis because deuterium would damage the natural ability that mitotic spindles have to divide cells equally. Mitosis creates cells and cells are the basic and structural unit of life; if the water in our bodies were replaced with 25% heavy water, this could result in sterilization. 50% or more could lead to death.

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Jessica Y

2/17/2018 07:12:00 pm

This article shows what happens when mitosis goes wrong. When the process of cell division results in incorrect DNA copies, the health effects can range from mild to deadly. When the improper copying of DNA reproduces cells uncontrollably, the cell cycle is disrupted, and tumors are formed. Another potential effect happens when spindle fibers fail to attach to each centromere and a daughter cell might have an extra or missing chromosome. The incorrect number of chromosomes leads to Down syndrome, Alzheimer’s or leukemia.

Mg2+ is an ion that is necessary in the process of cell division. The ATP that is produced by mitochondria must bond to the Mg2+ in order to work properly(creating Mg-ATP). Scientist created a machine called MARIO (Magnesium Ratiometric Indicator for Optical Imaging) which can detect Mg2+ in the cell. This would help detect abnormalities in cells, which could in the future help us diagnose and treat diseases such as cancer.

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Timothy I.

2/17/2018 08:20:53 pm

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2013/08/14/mitotic-spindles-could-help-develop-better-chemo-drugs/
This article talks about how the mitotic spindles created during cell division could help develop better chemotherapy drugs. Anti-cancer drugs that target the mitotic spindles, destroying dividing cells in tumours have serious side effects. However, targeting the mitotic spindle proteins that hold together the spindle's microtubules, could lead scientists to develop anti-cancer drugs with significantly less side effects. Research looking into ways to inhibit an enzyme in its role of building the proteins in the mitotic spindles is underway.

This comic illustrates the process of mitosis by using pizza as an analogy (because it's on the internet, pizza applies to everything). All the parts of mitosis - prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase - are represented in the comic.

Since Valentine's Day was this Wednesday (doge crying...), I found a post randomly on Instagram about some short sentences to your valentine:
Second one: Deoxyribonucleic Acid is just DNA, it means that your advanced DNA impressed me, which is kind of weird...

Fourth: Almost all plant cells have a cell wall, "wall" here also means the gap, so it is "Be closer to me, be my valentine"

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